IN JAPAN!
so everything on the web page is in japanese, so i hope this works. trip has been pretty awesome so far. flew to san francisco and then from there to osaka. i traded for an aisle seat and then as people were switching the seat next to me ended up being empty about half way through, so i spent the last 5 or so hours of the flight spread out across 2 seats in comfort. it was awesome. the hotel here in osaka is really nice, but the single rooms are really small. it works though. its weird that you are not allowed to take the key to your room outside of the hotel. they consider that stealing. you have to turn it in at the front desk when you leave and then ask for it back when you return. yesterday we had our rehearsal at a gynnastics arena in kobe, about an hour away. it was overcast and a little rainy, but it was at least 90 degrees and humid in the arena. we were sweating so bad. afterwards we went to a big mall in kobe. there was an old spaghetti factory there that i really wanted to go to, but the other baritones talked me into eating some japanese food. i pouted but it turned out to be pretty good. then we shopped for t-shirts with english on them, which the japanese love, but the english sayings dont make any sense! they have completely random sayings on them. i bought 2 :) then we went to an arcade 2 malls over (yeah, lots of malls) where they charged by how much time you spend there. there were tons of games, but jess and i spent the whole time playing the drum game that is similar to dance dance revolution. i have blisters from that, but it was fun. came back to osaka and we were all really tired but had to go find some dinner. not much was open, but we found a place with displays out front that looked pretty good. got seated but the menus were entirely in japanese with no pictures. so we all dragged our waiter, who spoke no english, outside and pointed to what we wanted. it ended up being really really good. i was afraid of the food, but i have been pleased so far. this morning we went to starbucks, which was surprisingly like US ones, except that they had separate garbages for lids and paper cups and plastic cups and burnable, and my favorite, non-comburnable items. now we are all wrapping our gifts for our host families tomorrow night. we have about another hour before we have to get ready for the parade. we saw them setting up earlier, its going to be pretty huge. and there are clearer skies today which means it will be warmer, but hopefully less humid. ok, better go. maybe i will get some internet somewhere else along the way and be able to update some more. ビェびぇ！！母、ティ氏sこおｌ。 can you read that? this keyboard rules. ok, more to come later. go daWgs!